How do I size a UITextView to its content?

Question

Is there a good way to adjust the size of a UITextView to conform to its content? Say for instance I have a UITextView that contains one line of text:

"Hello world"

I then add another line of text:

"Goodbye world"

Is there a good way in Cocoa Touch to get the rect that will hold all of the lines in the text view so that I can adjust the parent view accordingly?

As another example, look at the notes' field for events in the Calendar application - note how the cell (and the UITextView it contains) expands to hold all lines of text in the notes' string.

Answer 1

I found out a way to resize the height of a text field according to the text inside it and also arrange a label below it based on the height of the text field! Here is the code.

UITextView *_textView = [[UITextView alloc] initWithFrame:CGRectMake(10, 10, 300, 10)];
NSString *str = @"This is a test text view to check the auto increment of height of a text view. This is only a test. The real data is something different.";
_textView.text = str;

[self.view addSubview:_textView];
CGRect frame = _textView.frame;
frame.size.height = _textView.contentSize.height;
_textView.frame = frame;

UILabel *lbl = [[UILabel alloc] initWithFrame:CGRectMake(10, 5 + frame.origin.y + frame.size.height, 300, 20)];
lbl.text = @"Hello!";
[self.view addSubview:lbl];

Answer 2

Another method is the find the size a particular string will take up using the NSString method:

-(CGSize)sizeWithFont:(UIFont *)font constrainedToSize:(CGSize)size

This returns the size of the rectangle that fits the given string with the given font. Pass in a size with the desired width and a maximum height, and then you can look at the height returned to fit the text. There is a version that lets you specify line break mode also.

You can then use the returned size to change the size of your view to fit.

Answer 3

If you don't have the UITextView handy (for example, you're sizing table view cells), you'll have to calculate the size by measuring the string, then accounting for the 8 pt of padding on each side of a UITextView. For example, if you know the desired width of your text view and want to figure out the corresponding height:

NSString * string = ...;
CGFloat textViewWidth = ...;
UIFont * font = ...;

CGSize size = CGSizeMake(textViewWidth - 8 - 8, 100000);
size.height = [string sizeWithFont:font constrainedToSize:size].height + 8 + 8;

Here, each 8 is accounting for one of the four padded edges, and 100000 just serves as a very large maximum size.

In practice, you may want to add an extra font.leading to the height; this adds a blank line below your text, which may look better if there are visually heavy controls directly beneath the text view.

Answer 4

Based on Nikita Took's answer I came to the following solution in Swift which works on iOS 8 with autolayout:

    descriptionTxt.scrollEnabled = false
    descriptionTxt.text = yourText

    var contentSize = descriptionTxt.sizeThatFits(CGSizeMake(descriptionTxt.frame.size.width, CGFloat.max))
    for c in descriptionTxt.constraints() {
        if c.isKindOfClass(NSLayoutConstraint) {
            var constraint = c as! NSLayoutConstraint
            if constraint.firstAttribute == NSLayoutAttribute.Height {
                constraint.constant = contentSize.height
                break
            }
        }
    }

Answer 5

This works for both iOS 6.1 and iOS 7:

- (void)textViewDidChange:(UITextView *)textView
{
    CGFloat fixedWidth = textView.frame.size.width;
    CGSize newSize = [textView sizeThatFits:CGSizeMake(fixedWidth, MAXFLOAT)];
    CGRect newFrame = textView.frame;
    newFrame.size = CGSizeMake(fmaxf(newSize.width, fixedWidth), newSize.height);
    textView.frame = newFrame;
}

Or in Swift (Works with Swift 4.1 in iOS 11)

let fixedWidth = textView.frame.size.width
let newSize = textView.sizeThatFits(CGSize(width: fixedWidth, height: CGFloat.greatestFiniteMagnitude))
textView.frame.size = CGSize(width: max(newSize.width, fixedWidth), height: newSize.height)

If you want support for iOS 6.1 then you should also:

textview.scrollEnabled = NO;

Answer 6

Combined with Mike McMaster's answer, you might want to do something like:

[myTextView setDelegate: self];

...

- (void)textViewDidChange:(UITextView *)textView {
  if (myTextView == textView) {
     // it changed.  Do resizing here.
  }
}